


Bad News

by pm_lo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon Universe, M/M, Season 9, human!Cas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 17:11:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1234516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pm_lo/pseuds/pm_lo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam completes the trials. Dean and Cas don't deal well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [x](http://feelsspiral.tumblr.com/post/63858042963/this-came-on-my-ipod-the-other-day-and-gave-me)

The first thing Castiel ever saw was the sky on fire.

As an angel, he had perceived; he had observed; he had known the truth of things down to the smallest quark. But he had never seen with a pair of flesh and tissue eyes, rods and cones shaking under the force of fiery white comets inking across the infinite black sky.

The woods were at once silent and deafening - devoid of his family’s voices, screaming instead with bugs and rot and the distant sound of burning. The onslaught made his ears throb and his knees buckle. Temperature, something he had never chosen to register before, was suddenly at the forefront of his mind - his clothes a hot, suffocating weight pulling at his shoulders, scratching his skin.

As he clutched his head, discovering that breathing - _breathing_ \- made the rush more bearable, the lights in the sky faded. The night shrunk around him, darker, quieter.

By the time the pale sun rose and the forest opened onto a winding road, his shoes had worn red blisters onto his ankles. He shook his head as he blearily examined them, already overwhelmed by the flood of mundane _needs_ demanding his attention. It was dizzying. Blinding.

There was a diner across the street. His stomach grumbled.

He searched his pockets as he crossed the street, remembering vaguely that money would be required to obtain the food that he now, humiliatingly, needed. As he drew closer, a soft, greasy scent permeated the air. His mouth watered, his irritation fading. He was almost at the door when he noticed a payphone in the parking lot.

A hollow, flat voice answered Dean’s third cell phone. “Yeah.”

“Dean?”

“Cas?” He had never heard Dean say his name that way before: wrong; dead. An echo came back to him, a desperate shout from hours ago, the last thing he’d heard as Metatron cut into his throat. _Castiel!_

“What’s wrong?” Cas asked.

“Where the fuck are you, man? I been praying.”

Castiel stared at the hard-packed gravel underfoot. “Metatron... tricked me,” he said. “Naomi was right. It was a spell.”

“That what with the light show?” Dean asked, bored.

“All the angels have fallen.” The words did something to his eyes and behind his nose. Castiel shook his head roughly.

“Shit.”

“Dean, what’s wrong?” Cas asked, tired of the nagging irritation in his ears when Dean spoke. “What happened?”

There was a long pause. When Dean’s voice came through, it was low and mechanical. “He did it. I told him not to, I fucking begged. He did it anyway.”

“Who?” Cas asked. “Sam?”

“Closed the gates, Cas. Hell’s outta business.”

Cas’s stomach dropped, leaving his skin prickling. “He completed the trials. He... ?”

“He’s gone.”

Cas squeezed his eyes shut tightly, trying to stay afloat over the coldness settling onto his shoulders. “Dean... Where are you?”

“You know, I have no idea,” Dean said almost whimsically. “Some fucking motel. I been driving, ganking demons everywhere I see ‘em.”

The slurring in Dean’s voice made more sense now. “Have you been drinking?”

There was a chuckle over the line, the only response.

“Dean, I -” Cas hesitated. “I can’t come to you. Not right away. Get back to the bunker. I’ll meet you there.”

“Sure thing, Cas.” He could hear the dead smile in Dean’s voice. He hung up.

The diner was quiet in the pink morning light, an elderly couple in a booth at the back the only other customers. The smell was even more distracting inside, making Castiel’s head spin. Popcorn at the bunker hadn’t been anything like this. He wondered if they had hamburgers.

“One?” He heard. The waitress had bright eyes, dull brown skin, feather-light wrinkles around her mouth, vivid green makeup caked onto her eyelids - and that was all Castiel could see. As an angel, he would have known her ancestry, her history, every time she’d ever stubbed her toe, the spidery electricity of her brain. Now she was nothing more than the physical artifacts Castiel’s limited human senses could detect. A complete mystery.

“Uh, yes,” he said. She led him to his seat.

He ordered coffee, which was much hotter and more bitter and distracting than it had been in the Biggerson’s, somehow. When the pancakes arrived their weight on his tongue, the way they glued his mouth shut and smothered the emptiness in his stomach, was transcendent. He couldn’t suck the water from the glass fast enough. He knew he was getting strange looks from the elderly couple, felt a twinge of embarrassment from the small part of himself that remembered he was (had been) an angel. He ordered seconds.

In a corner the TV that was blaring the morning news switched to coverage of the _mysterious meteor shower_ , and the pancakes turned to cement in Castiel’s mouth.

He could almost see, in the blurry video footage, the shape of wings tearing and detaching from the streaks of light as they fell. His stomach turned, the smell of food suddenly making him sweat. His mind dragged him back to Naomi’s blank office, the sharp smile on Metatron’s face as he’d bottled up everything of Castiel and taken it away to wreck Castiel’s worst devastation to date - worse than the war, worse than the Leviathan, because this was every angel in heaven, and every human on earth the target of their wrath. The butchery had likely been underway for hours. The table swam before him as Castiel dropped his head to his palms, breathing harshly, trying to calm the frantic beat of his heart. He had ruined them both. 

He had tried to get out, tried to pay his penance. And one foolish moment of trying to be a hero - it was good that he was in this diner, tethered to hunger and pain and oxygen like a mite in dust. He doubted he could hurt anyone this way. 

He should have known better than to trust Metatron. Hadn’t he thought he could trust Uriel and Anna and Naomi too? The only ones he could truly rely upon were the Winchesters. 

Wincheste _r_. 

And he’d hurt Dean so badly he no longer knew if he was even his ally. 

Food was a distraction. He realized as he was digging into his sausage that the elderly couple were staring at him again, so he narrowed his eyes, chewing with his mouth open. The old man _tsk_ ed, grabbing his wife’s hand and forcing their attention away. Out the window, the sun was climbing above the vivid green of the trees, casting Castiel’s shadow across the flecked formica table. When the waitress arrived with his check, her shadow fell over his.

He looked up at her, trying to do what the Winchesters did, to see something in a human that didn’t have to be taken from the celestial imprint of the universe. All he could see was that her skin looked warm in the sun. He realized when she cleared her throat that he had been staring at her hand, holding out the small green and white bill. He shivered, suddenly cold.

“Sorry,” he said, taking the check from her carefully. As he waited for her to return with change, he examined the inside of James’ wallet. There was only dust, some faded receipts and ticket stubs, and James’ driver’s license, showing a completely alien face - so open and young, so human. His eyes seemed to sparkle. 

Castiel frowned.

*

Cas took a bus. It was a long ride to even get in the vicinity of the Men of Letters bunker, depleting most of Castiel's funds. The bus smelled, another delightful input Cas could no longer control his exposure or reaction to. There were a dozen other passengers, some seated just a few rows away, but Castiel had the strange sensation of being in a bubble somehow, farther away from the others in an intangible way he couldn't parse. He was very aware of the air on his skin.

There was broken glass on the bunker floor when Cas let himself in, presumably from the giant table in the entryway, now a nest of burnt wires and jagged chunks of screen. Chairs, books, and lamps were overthrown, weapons lying scattered among the mess. Somewhere, something was dripping.

"Dean?" He called out. "Kevin?"

Receiving no answer, he walked further back, through the library, the kitchen, into the dim hallways he had seen but never gone down. His stomach grumbled as he walked, his thoughts flashing back to the pancakes in the diner as his eyebrows twitched in irritation. Humans required such frequent maintenance. 

He only had to check a few rooms before the sound of clinking glass brought him to Dean's, where Dean was on his bed, pawing furiously through one of his travel bags, shirts and guns and empty bottles scattered over the bedspread and floor. Blood matted his hair to his head in patches, vivid red streaked across his neck and knuckles. He made no indication that he had heard or noticed Castiel. “Dean?” Cas asked again.

That finally got his head to snap up, staring at Cas through glazed, hooded eyes. “What took you so long?”

“I -”

“Good thing you’re here,” he continued, glancing around the room. “Do you see Ruby’s knife? Dunno where I put it - just hope I didn’t leave it in that last son of a bitch in Hastings.”

“Dean,” Castiel said, walking further into the room. “You’re bleeding.”

Dean huffed, staring into his bag. “What’s new.”

“Stop,” Cas said, pulling it away. Dean scowled at him. “Wait here.”

He dropped the bag on the floor by the door to the bathroom, then paused. It occurred to him that here, in the bunker - the closest thing he’d know to a home in his new state - he could finally relax. He shrugged off his trenchcoat and suit jacket and jerked off his tie, dropping them on Dean’s bag, then toed off the horrible shoes. That was better, though he still felt unaccountably warm. Dean stared at him strangely.

In the bathroom he dampened a small towel, and back in the room dragged a chair next to the bed, sat down, and started gently rubbing at the blood on Dean’s temple. Dean pulled away at first, but Castiel pushed his shoulder down insistently and after a moment, he closed his eyes and his breath rushed out, sweet and alcohol-scented. 

Hours ago, Cas would have been able to visualize Dean’s arteries and make sure they were properly healed, but now all he could see was skin - smooth, wet, porous, tan. The white towel bloomed pink and then red and redder, the color seeping towards Cas’s fingertips, the same shade as Dean’s parted lips.

“What’s that?” Dean asked, making Cas startle slightly. He frowned.

“What?”

Dean lifted an unsteady finger. Cas couldn’t see where he was pointing, but he lifted his other hand and felt along Jimmy’s - _his_ collarbone, eventually finding a small, thin scratch. He must have sustained it in the woods at some point. “Tree branch, maybe,” he said. “Or a bug bite.” 

“Since when do you get bug bites?” Dean scoffed. “Cas?”

Cas sighed and lowered the towel. A drop of red-tinted water ran down Dean’s face. “Metatron’s spell. The last ingredient... was my grace.”

“He took it?” Dean asked. “So you’re... you’re human?” 

“Extremely,” Cas replied, lifting the towel to Dean’s neck. He winced.

“Human,” Dean repeated. “How’s that?”

“Limiting. Tiring. Distracting,” he muttered. “How do you stand it?”

“Really fucking great.”

Cas thought of the look on Sam’s face as he’d told Dean to leave with him, to allow him to complete the trials unaided. His facile human eyes burned.

“Dean...” he murmured. “What happened?”

Dean’s eyes were closed. “He didn’t want to hear it. He was glowing, an’ the wind was rushing, and it was like nothing I said mattered. Speaking different languages, or something. I tried, Cas, I screamed. And he just...”

He trailed off. Castiel swallowed thickly, his vision failing him. “If I were still an angel...”

“I know.”

An image of Sam in the church swirling with heavenly power was bright but murky in Cas’s mind. “So he completed the third trial? He cured a demon?” Cas frowned. “Wait, Crowley?”

Dean flinched slightly. He shook his shoulder out from under the towel Cas had stopped moving a while ago. “You done with this, Florence?”

“Was he cured?”

“Must’ve been,” Dean said, staring at the floor. “Wouldn’t shut up, he was babbling all this nonsense, crying something awful.”

Cas glanced down at Dean’s hands, swollen and caked with blood. “Where is he?”

Dean clenched his jaw and stared over Cas’s shoulder, his eyes fixed on the middle distance. 

Cas lifted one of Dean’s hands and started dabbing at the blood and dirt. He navigated carefully, trying to avoid the deeper, more painful-looking cuts. When the power under Jimmy’s skin had been celestial, he could have flayed the flesh from Dean’s bones with no more than a flick of his wrist. The strength in his hands now was laughable in comparison, but perfect for the task of treating another human’s wounds.

Dean’s silence allowed the sensation-overload to creep in again, slower this time, not quite as harshly overwhelming in the quiet underground space. Small noises created a hum in Castiel’s ears - something mechanical from the walls, the strange, inside-out thump of Castiel’s heartbeat, his and Dean’s breathing, Dean’s small hisses and gasps in response to Cas’s care. Each breath brought the smell of the bunker - musty, aged, shot through with the Winchesters’ characteristic gun oil scent and something that was just Dean. Apropos of nothing, Castiel realized he was shorter than Dean now - truly smaller, not just temporarily diminished by a vessel. 

The skin of Dean’s hands was damp and soft under his as he slowly moved from knuckle to knuckle. This close, his head bent in near Dean’s, the room was even warmer, the cuffs of Cas’s shirtsleeves itching against his forearms. His skin prickled in the cold air. He felt dizzy, and wondered if that was hunger again. He glanced up, meeting Dean’s dilated, glassy eyes. He knew Dean was intoxicated, something Castiel used to understand only intellectually (aside from that one time during the apocalypse) but felt viscerally now, like his consciousness was two steps behind his actions, like he wasn’t in control of where his eyes were moving or how he licked his lips, like he was being dragged along behind himself, helpless to do anything but watch.

He stood abruptly. “You need water,” he told Dean.

Dean was staring at his hands when Cas returned with a glass. “I told him he was a screw-up,” he said.

“Crowley?” Cas asked, confused.

Dean looked up at him, his eyes wet. “He had to confess, for the last trial,” he said. Cas’s stomach dropped. “And I told him to talk about Ruby, about losing his soul, about -”

“Drink this.” Cas shoved the glass at him. Dean’s lips trembled a moment before he put the glass between them, taking big, sloppy gulps. The column of his throat worked rhythmically. Cas shook his head. The air in the room was muggy.

When the glass came down Dean said, “He thought he had failed me, he -”

“No,” Cas said fiercely. “It’s not your fault.”

The glass shrieked as it hit the ground near the bed. “He had his white picket fence and his dog,” Dean slurred. “I came back and tore him away from it. Dragged him back to his.”

“It was his choice.”

Dean raised his head then, looking Castiel in the eye, his own wide and pleading. He looked just as he had in the crypt, damaged and desperate and begging Cas to understand. “I killed him,” he said. “I was supposed to protect him. I -”

Cas silenced Dean with a hand on his cheek. It didn’t heal anything, but Dean’s skin was a revelation against Castiel’s, hot and prickly, bone shifting below, the thrum of his pulse battering at Cas’s fingertips. He desperately wanted to comfort Dean and something was boiling under his skin and the two seemed to have everything to do with each other. He kissed him.

The dry press of skin was a starting gun, Cas’s entire body jumping to attention even as Dean stiffened under him. He pulled back just far enough to see the blurred colors of Dean’s eyes in front of his. “Dean,” he breathed. “Dean, Dean, let me.”

And then Dean pulled on the back of his neck and his tongue was in his mouth and they fell down together. Their scramble up the bed kept jostling the kiss out of place, but that was okay because Cas just wanted to touch as much of Dean’s skin as he could get his hands on. A harsh shove to his shoulder put Cas on his back, Dean a heavy weight on top of him, a leg wedged between his own. His hands ran over Dean’s back, up his shirt, down his hips, and stopped when he found Dean’s erection. _Yes_ , he thought senselessly.

He fumbled aside buttons and zippers until he could close his fist around Dean’s dick. Dean bit Cas’s ear and muttered half-words and thrust into Castiel’s hand and gripped his arms until he felt ten stinging marks. The fire in Cas’s blood set his wrist pumping madly, grasp tightening as if he was touching himself, as if he could pull his own pleasure out of Dean’s skin. Dean made a choked noise and pinned Cas down as he came, dampening the sheets and the side of Cas’s jeans. Cas’s hands flew to Dean’s ass and tugged, rubbing himself mindlessly against Dean’s hard thigh until he came jerkily into his boxers.

After that his limbs were like sand and falling asleep seemed like a fantastic idea.

He woke up hours later, the lights of the room harsh on his crusted eyelids, his clothes still hot and itchy and now uncomfortably sticky around his groin. Dean’s weight was gone, though the bed was still warm. There was a faint retching sound from the bathroom. Cas winced, shimmied out of his pants and boxers, shifted into a more comfortable position, and passed out again.

*

Waking up the second time was clearer. Castiel sat up in bed, stretched, rubbed his eyes again, and wondered if this refreshed, whole sensation was what being human was supposed to feel like all the time. Perhaps sheer exhaustion could explain his... unguarded behavior of the evening before.

Dean was still gone. The bathroom was empty, but there were any number of places drunk Dean could have passed out the night before. Not the kitchen, or the library, and there was no sign that the ruin of the Big Board had been disturbed, luckily. 

He ran out of patience with the grimy sensation on his skin at that point, and went back to the bathroom for disgusting bodily requirements and a shower that felt heavenly. Brushing his teeth, a new experience but easy to decipher, was even better. He’d been walking around pantsless, which belatedly embarrassed him, but it was easy enough to fish a fresh set of clothes out of Dean’s dresser.

This time, when he walked through the library, he saw it - the small folded piece of paper on the table that had “Cas and Kevin” written on top. He picked it up and unfolded it.

_Metatron got Sam killed. I’ve got to take him out - it’s the least Sammy deserves._

Under the paper was a small wooden box, left open to reveal Dean’s key to the bunker. 

Castiel was hungry, but he’d seen the Winchesters subsist on alcohol plenty of times before. He found the liquor cabinet.

This was _much_ better human. For one thing, it took a fraction of the time and energy to become much, much more intoxicated. And it dulled the onslaught of sensation, or at least, made it unimportant. The hard wooden floor under his back as he looked up at the vaulted ceilings; the taste of bile on the back of his tongue; the smell of Dean that still permeated the air: all, whatever.

He eventually caved and rummaged through the fridge. He eliminated more, tried walking down the halls as they attempted to spin and whirl underneath him, and spent hours paging through books he didn’t read. He stumbled into Sam’s room at one point and stared at a pair of gigantic shoes and then threw up in a toilet bowl down the hall. He fell asleep as he had expected to find Dean that morning, curled up on the cold porcelain tile.

Kevin woke him up with a gruff, “What the hell?”

“Erf,” Castiel replied, and grasped the toilet again. Nothing came out. Had he eaten anything yesterday? His head was pounding and his stomach twisted in pain.

“So... something happened to you,” Kevin said, looming above.

“Metatron,” Cas said. “Took my grace.”

Kevin whistled, low and long. “Shit.”

“So much,” Castiel muttered.

“Where’s Dean?”

Cas’s stomach turned over again, and he pointed out at the library. “Table.”

He took a few long swallows as Kevin’s footsteps disappeared around the corner, feeling marginally better. He was just beginning to contemplate standing when Kevin’s, “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” floated back to him, followed by Kevin and the note a moment later.

“He is... grieving.”

Kevin’s eyes flicked to him and then back to the letter. “You saw him?”

Castiel’s face burned. Kevin didn’t seem to notice; perhaps the flecked vomit distracted him. “Briefly.”

“He doesn’t want Metatron,” Kevin mused. “He wants something to put him out of his misery. Suicide by angel.”

Cas’s heart was beating so loudly in his chest - how did humans stand it? He looked Kevin up and down, then frowned, and said, “I arrived yesterday. Where were you?”

Kevin looked up from the note finally. “I moved out.”

“You... ?”

Now Kevin was frowning defensively. “I told Dean, we shut the gates, I’m out.”

“So you just left?” Cas asked. “After Sam?”

“Not at first!” Kevin said, his voice rising. “I’m not a dick, I tried talking to him. But he was... such a dick,” he whined. “And now this? He leaves us a note? Like we’re some kind of bad -” He broke off, eyes narrowed as he looked at Cas for what felt like the first time in the conversation. “You’re not doing too well, huh?” he asked.

_I failed the Winchesters as an angel, and I failed Dean as a human._ Cas took a slow breath. “No.”

“How does some hangover cure sound?”

Despite Castiel’s suspicions, the breakfast Kevin hastily prepared did much to settle his stomach. At Kevin’s insistence he took another shower. They had much to recommend them, but they offered too much time alone with his thoughts for Castiel’s liking.

“Why are you back?” Cas asked Kevin after he got out and dressed, hair dripping down his neck.

Kevin held up a small black box. “Forgot my walkman in my room.”

Cas glanced at it, then down at the floor. When he looked up again, Kevin was chewing on his lip. “You need a ride?”

“A ride?”

“You’re not staying here, are you?” Kevin asked. “C’mon, man, it’s a hole in the ground. And Dean’s gone, and Sam -” he paused, blowing out a rush of air. “You’re human now, right? You have any idea where you’re going? What you wanna do?”

Castiel’s head buzzed. Unlike last night, when he’d been swaying into Dean, now he felt unsteady, with no safety net, nothing he wanted to collide with. 

“Something small,” he told Kevin. “Something... some place I can’t hurt anyone.”

Kevin nodded slowly. After a moment he stood, pocketed his walkman, approached Cas, and put his arms around him. It wasn’t the first hug Castiel had received without understanding the exact reasoning why, but this one felt different. A cousin of the warmth he had felt with Dean - grounding. Affirming. Friendly.

He had no possessions to pack, but Kevin made him take a plastic bag full of clothes Castiel suspected were stolen from Dean’s room and some food from the pantry. Kevin’s car was squat and serviceable, something Dean would shudder at. If he hadn’t left.

It was only miles out from the bunker that Castiel realized he had left his trenchcoat. 

*

Dean’s eyes flicked over the old woman, from her frizzy gray hair to the age spots scattered along her forearms to the way her thick, wrinkled skin puckered around the angel blade pressed into the underside of her chin.

“This is just wrong,” he drawled.

She glanced at him coldly. “It can take decades to develop a suitable vessel. After the fall, I had to choose quickly.”

“So you chose grandma?” Dean asked, pushing the blade just a hint deeper. “She even all in there? I doubt it was informed consent.”

“Some of my brothers were arrogant, picked vessels for strength instead of compatibility. This matriarch is from my genetic line - she’ll last me much longer than a linebacker. Besides, human strength means nothing to an angel.” This last was said with the beginnings of a thunderclap that Dean knew meant showy shadow wings were on the horizon.

So he twisted the angel blade a bit, wincing as the motion jostled his hip - ironically, it felt like the bitch had fractured it when she’d thrown him across the room. Grandma angel gulped and the nascent wing-shadows faded. Dean gritted his teeth against the throbbing in the back of his head where she’d gotten another hit in. “Talk.”

She glared at him. “We want him dead as much as you do. He destroyed heaven. He reduced us to... this.”

“Then spill,” Dean said. “How do I take him out?”

“If we knew, he’d be dead by now,” she spat. “Him and his conspirator, Castiel.”

Nothing said during an interrogation got under Dean Winchester’s skin anymore. _Thanks, Dad_. “Sorry to tell you, Ruth,” he said, voice even. “Metatron beat you to it. Cas is dead.”

She scoffed. “You’re just saying that to protect him.”

He cocked his head. “Can you hear him on the ole angel radio anymore?”

She frowned and tilted her head slightly. Dean swallowed against the dryness in his throat, nothing more than gritty exhaustion from the fight. “... no,” she said after a moment, then returned her gaze to him, sharper now. “You don’t look too broken up about it. Guess the rumors weren’t true.”

That earned another millimeter progression of the blade. “You ever hear the rumor that Winchesters kill for each other?”

“I’m starting to think that one is true,” she said, eyes almost crossing as she tried to see her chin, then raised, wide and almost - wondering. “Your brother really did it? Shut the gates of hell?”

“Cost him his life,” Dean said.

“Then he has our gratitude,” she said lowly, and fuck if she didn’t sound sincere. “If I could help you kill Metatron, I would. But with him alone in heaven, there’s nothing we can do. It’s an fortress. Impregnable.”

“So you’re saying I get him out of heaven, he’s killable?”

“He’s still the only true angel left anymore.”

“Not a problem,” Dean leered, leaning in, letting his weight force the blade deeper. 

“Then yes,” she yelped. “But getting him out of heaven - it’s impossible. He has no reason to leave, and you can’t get in - no one can.”

“Been to Hell and back,” Dean said. “Twice. Heaven once too. I’m not worried.” He dropped the blade and her shoulders slumped in relief, until he brought it up again, cocked for a chest strike.

“Wait!” she shouted. “I told you what you wanted. I’m your ally.”

Dean grinned at her. As it had for the past few days, it felt uneven, like one of the screws was loose, leaving it dangling like an old painting. “No such thing.”

*

Sam’s face was tense, sweating, clenched tight with hope.

Dean wanted to lift a hand and touch him, but he couldn’t move, like he was trapped in ice.

“ - remember thinking I could never go on a quest like that,” Sam was saying. “Because I’m not clean.”

“Dean!”

Dean jerked awake, beer sloshing onto his arm. Kevin was across the booth from him, looking as furious as pint-sized prophets (did they make full-sized versions?) could get.

“Whuh?” Dean said.

“When was the last time you slept?” Kevin asked. On the gravel outside, huge tanker trucks crawled slowly past each other, only a few whining streetlamps guiding the way.

Dean shrugged, giving Kevin a quick once-over. “How’s civilian life treating you?”

Kevin’s stinkeye was adorable. “It’s great, Dean.” He caught the waitress’s eye.

“You being safe?”

Kevin scowled. “Coming from the guy who was fast asleep at a diner.”

“My instincts are finely honed,” Dean said as Kevin ignored him and ordered a coffee.

“I know how to take care of myself, Dean,” Kevin said, and for a second the petulant indignation made Dean’s heart stop. He rubbed his eyes as if he was getting the last of the sand out.

“So listen,” he said, once the kid had his caffeine. “I need something translated.”

“Only if I get to keep the tablet afterwards,” Kevin answered promptly.

Dean scowled. “Absolutely not.”

“I’m still the prophet, Dean,” Kevin said. “It belongs with me.”

“You’re enough of a target as it is,” Dean said. “Prophet plus tablet? Angels would have your ass in seconds.”

“But a Winchester with the tablet is enbeedee,” Kevin said, rolling his eyes. 

Dean rummaged around in his bag and dropped an angel blade on the table with a heavy _clunk_. Kevin looked suitably intimidated. “I can handle ‘em,” Dean said. 

Then he dropped the tablet next to the blade. Kevin’s fingers honest to god twitched. Dean waited until he had his full attention again, and said, “I need to know how to reverse Metatron’s spell.”

“You want the angels back in heaven?” Kevin frowned. “Why?”

“It’s the only way to gank him,” Dean said. “It’s all I’ve been hearing from every feather I’ve managed to catch, and I’m starting to think maybe they’re telling me the truth.”

“You’ve been hunting angels?” Kevin asked. “On your own?”

“Yeah. Why?”

He scowled, and pulled the tablet toward him. “No reason.” He sighed. “This could take a while.”

“I got time,” Dean said, and started dabbing his jacket with a napkin.

“What, now?”

Dean glanced around the diner. “Seems nicer than Garth’s boat.”

“Let me take it with me, I’ll get you something in a few -”

“Nope,” Dean said. “Tablet stays with me. You can’t do it today, we’ll meet up again tomorrow.”

Kevin glared at him and shook his head, dropping his eyes to the tablet. “Dick.”

“Chop chop,” Dean said.

With Kevin in nerd-prophet mode and nothing but the trucks and the fluorescent buzz to distract him, Dean could feel the dream and the memories clamoring to resurface. He cleared his throat and took another swig of his tepid beer, gripping the bottle tight, but his stupid brain would only let him stop thinking about Sam if it was replaced by a different horrible memory. 

Like his last night at the bunker. God. He really would do anything if he was hammered, wouldn’t he? He cringed just thinking about it - rubbing one off on _Cas_. His newly-human, formerly-evil, $50-bucks-says-virgin - 

Friend. He’d drunk-fucked his best friend, _god_ , he was an idiot.

It was good he’d left. Cas shouldn’t have to deal with his -

“There,” Kevin said, pushing a receipt toward him, something scribbled on the back. 

“That’s it?” He asked. Dean hadn’t even noticed him starting to write. Christ, the sun was up.

“You’re welcome.”

“Thanks,” he said automatically, pocketing the receipt. He stashed the tablet and the blade, ignoring Kevin’s pointed stare, and zipped the bag. “Well, stay safe,” he said, and started to get up.

“Wait,” Kevin said. Dean hovered a moment, then sat back in the seat.

“When you and Sam were hunting,” Kevin said, and Dean’s lips quirked in an angry smile, his eyes shot off to the side. “You guys could’ve easily gotten iced on any run-of-the-mill salt-and-burn job, saving one, maybe two people.”

“So?” Dean asked, irritable.

“So that’s how most hunters die,” Kevin said. “Their sacrifice saves a handful. Sam’s saved millions.”

The air in Dean’s lungs was icy. “You’re saying you’re, what? Happy about this?”

“No,” Kevin said, not angry anymore. “I’m saying you both made your choice.”

Dean’s shoulders still throbbed from the last angel he’d taken down, but it was a good kind of pain, the kind that let him know he was on the right track. This wasn’t a choice. This was what he had to do, what he’d always done. The world wasn’t right with Dean alive and Sammy gone.

“Thanks for the spell,” Dean said, and left.

*

Kevin gave Castiel enough cash to pay for a few nights in a motel on the edge of a wood, with the advice to, “get a job - that won’t last long”. 

So Castiel found a job at a gas station. It was soothing: stacking the Cup Noodles. Cleaning humans’ spills. Helping people (buy scratch-off lotto tickets).

Succeeding at something - creating, instead of destroying. 

He tried not to imagine what the Winchesters - Winchester would think of his new life. He wondered how his brothers and sisters were faring in their new lives. He cleaned burnt, crusted chili out of the microwave for the third time that week.

He thought of Dean more often than he cared to admit. Would he enjoy the small, lukewarm apple pies on sale here, or call them a disgrace? Would he appreciate the view of the pine trees across the road, as Castiel did? What would he make of the quasi-pornographic magazines they sold (no Busty Asian Beauties, but men seemed fairly interested in Maxim)? Thinking of Dean and sex in the same breath made his stomach turn over. It was easier, as a human, to forget.

After Kevin’s seed money was gone his limited paycheck from the gas station didn’t allow him to afford a motel, much less an actual home, so he procured a sleeping bag and slept in the employee room. He cut open the stack of newspapers one morning to see the headline _Violent Crime Drops to Lowest Rate in Ten Years_. He felt a smile stretch his face and started laughing. Laughing turned to hiccuping, then crying.

He didn’t have much money, but it was enough for a fifth, and that was enough for Castiel.

The flood of meaningless input was still there, still overwhelming - sounds, smells, tastes. He dreamt of Dean one night, something half-formed and dark, and woke up hard, his heart pounding uncomfortably. He ate all the time, Cup Noodles and slim jims and the terrible pie, food that made him just as nauseous as the liquor, but not as satisfyingly numb afterwards. The humans who came into the store pinged reactions from him in a way they never had before: an old man with black teeth and rotten breath that made Castiel’s skin crawl. A tall man with thick arms and green eyes and a low, soft voice that made Castiel feel calm. A young man with jittery eyebrows and pink lips and thick sunglasses that made Castiel’s skin hot.

Lust embarrassed him more than any of his other new human urges, because it was the one he couldn’t completely slake himself. Even dreaming of Dean or thinking of him as he touched himself felt like a violation. But he couldn’t stop touching himself, couldn’t stop thinking of that night at the bunker and craving more. His violent kisses with Meg and fumbling, halfway experiences with Daphne had been nothing like this - they had stayed on the surface of his skin, curious, intriguing, but distant, the same way vision and smells had been. This rose up from inside him, gripped his mind in bony fingers and refused to let go.

The jittery man came in late one night, standing in front of the energy drinks while poking at something in his palm. He glanced up at Castiel as he wandered closer, seeing the moment Castiel realized it was a pile of small pills in his hand. He smiled wolfishly, and offered Cas one. Castiel was bored of the liquor already.

It made the colors in the store brighter, brighter and wonderful, so bright Castiel didn’t have room to think of angels or Dean or Sam. He and the jittery man fucked in the back room that was his home. It was less confusing and as physically satisfying as sex with Dean had been, but afterwards the jittery man threw up over him and, like Dean, left. Unlike with Dean, Castiel was relieved. He was also, at that point, used to cleaning up vomit.

The jittery man left some of his pills behind in his haste. It became Castiel’s nightly routine, taking one of the pills and watching the colors blur, mixing it with the alcohol to see what effect he could create. Eventually he started taking the pills in the morning too - it didn’t seem to matter if he stacked the ramen neatly or gave people correct change on the first try or if the lights flickered. No one noticed. No one cared.

He took an inopportune cocktail one morning that left his fingers thick and clumsy, and ended up breaking the icee machine, slush pouring out onto his pants and the floor, slippery slush that put Castiel on his back in the cold, staring up at the speckled grid ceiling. He felt cold all over, and it occurred to him that he might not be breathing. _I never breathed before_ , he thought.

The tall man with the green eyes, the regular, appeared above him. His voice was low, soft, and soothing. He held a hand down, toward Castiel.

“You need help,” he said.

“Okay,” said Castiel.


	2. Chapter 2

_Three countervailing ingredients_ , the first part of Kevin’s translation read. Three ingredients to create the counter to Metatron’s spell, like the three that had created it.

The house was charming - squat, cream-colored, flowers trimming the front. It was a hot day, the last gasp of summer before the fall, but the house looked like it would be cool inside. The Impala was not, and Dean squirmed in his fed suit as he watched a young woman push a stroller up the path to the house and let herself in.

Dean knocked on the warm red front door moments later, readying his badge in his pocket. A slim guy with dusty brown hair answered, smiling genially. “Can I help you?”

The house was, indeed, cool inside - modern but cozy, with big comfortable couches. Something started squealing when Dean sat down, and he jumped up, fishing a blinking toy out from under the cushion.

“Sorry about that!” The man said, taking it from Dean and tossing it into the corner. “Kids, y’know? So -”

“Who is this?” The sharp question came from the woman Dean had watched arrive, glaring at him from the kitchen.

“FBI,” her husband answered. “Apparently he needs to ask us some questions about the guy next door - Ted?”

“It’ll only take a few minutes, ma’am,” Dean said, the words coming by rote.

“Don’t FBI agents usually come in pairs?” She asked.

“Usually,” Dean said agreeably, “But my partner’s back at the hotel, laid up with a cold.” He fished a business card out of his pocket and held it out to her. “You can call my supervisor if you like, make sure everything’s on the up and up.”

He struggled not to twitch under her heavy gaze, feeling claustrophobic in this stupid suit, in the stupid suburban house. He was itching for a fight, but here he was, working a “case” (sort of), the first since -

The moment broke when the wife sat next to her husband, laying a hand on his shoulder. Dean held in his sigh. 

It took another five minutes of bogus questions for it to seem natural when he asked if he could use their restroom. “Sure thing,” the husband said. “I actually have to run - game night.”

“Of course,” Dean said. “Thanks for your time.”

Dean was halfway down the hall toward the nursery when the front door shut, and a second later he was body-checked against the wall. The pain got his heart going. He fought a grin.

Dean had never been one for research, and without the bunker, Bobby, or - anyone else, it just wasn’t happening. He got as far as “giants” on Wikipedia and decided there had to be a faster way.

“There was a rumor,” the angel had said around a mouthful of blood. “It might be nothing, but - one of my sisters, Leah. Some years ago, she fled.”

“She fell?”

“No,” he’d said. “She just left.”

“I may have been out of the game for a while,” Leah growled against his neck, “but I’m not an idiot, _Winchester_.”

“I’m not here to hurt you, I swear,” he slurred against the wall. 

“And my family?” Leah asked. “Are they going to be as lucky?”

“You a friend of Metatron’s?” he countered.

The pressure against his back lessened infinitesimally. “Of course not. Why?”

“I have the spell that’ll reverse his,” Dean said. “Give the angels back their wings, put him on the defensive.”

“Going after Metatron?” She scoffed. “You Winchesters really do have a death wish.”

“I can take him out,” Dean said. “All I need is your help.”

They entered the nursery together, Dean walking slowly, cradling his skull where he was pretty sure Leah had given him what she claimed was a “defensive” concussion. She crossed the room to the crib, picked up the small, curly haired child, turned to Dean, and said, “You so much as _blink_ at her wrong -”

“Yeah, yeah, angelic wrath, I know,” he said. “So. This is a nephilim?”

Her eyes narrowed. “My daughter’s name is Olive.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “Olive? I don’t remember that one from scripture.”

“My husband’s mother’s name,” Leah said. “She passed away last year.”

Dean shook his head. “I’m sorry, you don’t think this is a little odd? Family names, in-laws? You’re -” he pointed at her vaguely. “Who even is that, in there? Was she married before you possessed her? Does your so-called husband know?”

“My vessel was terminally ill,” Leah said. “There are ailments even we can’t cure, you know. She was devout. She wanted me to use her body after her soul left.”

“Wow,” Dean said. “That’s moving. I might cry.”

“That was three years ago. I met my husband a year after that,” she said. “He... doesn’t know what I am.”

“Let’s hope Olive doesn’t start tossing any cars around then,” Dean said.

Leah turned so that her daughter was almost entirely shielded behind her body. “You may not have heard it this way from your best friend Castiel, but there were plenty of us in heaven who weren’t on his side _or_ Raphael’s. We just wanted the fighting to stop. Wanted everything to go back to the way it had been.”

“Well, then - bailing, finding an empty vessel, shacking up with a human - that do a lot to advance the cause of peace?”

“I found peace,” Leah said. She turned Olive just slightly, staring into her wide eyes and stroking her soft, light hair.

“I don’t need to hurt her,” Dean said, voice coming out choked for some reason. “I just need -”

“I got it,” Leah said. She walked carefully over to a changing table in the corner, never looking away from Olive as she fished out a miniature pair of scissors and snipped away a tiny lock of her daughter’s hair.

“Here,” she said. Dean held out his hand. The hair was so light he almost couldn’t feel it in his palm. “Now get out.”

“I won’t -” he coughed. “I won’t tell anyone that you’re here. I mean, if you’re -”

“I knew the risks when I chose them,” Leah said. “Now get. Out.”

*

The coffee at the meeting Joss brought him to was terrible. But it was free, and so were the cookies, so Castiel had both.

The people in the circle told stories of joblessness, accidents, abandonment, death, despair. Castiel wasn’t the only one struggling with the distractions and temptations of lust, hunger, apathy, and greed - it was what landed them all here, in one way or another. Some were as wrinkled and wrung-out as Castiel had become; some worse; some clean and polished and professional, keeping the haunted look in their eyes tightly leashed.

Joss was seated almost directly across from him, looking placid as always. Unlike the Winchesters, who always seemed like they were using every inch of their gargantuan height - bristling with aggression and strength and intelligence and power - Joss was large in a way that felt spread-out, settled, relaxed.

After rescuing him from drowning via slushie, Joss had taken him to the bathroom and helped him get cleaned up. Then he’d demanded to see Cas’s stash of pills. They’d all gone down the toilet.

“Why are you doing this?” Castiel had asked. “It’s been my experience that h- people are distrustful of strangers. Especially those acting... strangely.”

Joss had stared at him in his peaceful way, skin seeming so warm under the fluorescent lights. There were little wrinkles ringing his eyes - he was maybe four or five years older than Jimmy (would have been).

“I saw you, a few weeks ago,” Joss said. “In the store. You were stacking the ramen so carefully. I thought it was - well, I thought it was cute,” he said with a slight blush. His eyes flicked over Castiel’s face. “Something happened to you.”

“A lot of things,” Cas replied.

The stories he was hearing now made him shift with a new shade of guilt. He felt - arrogant, for being so preoccupied with angels and demons as the only causes of human misery, as if there weren’t small, mundane, ordinary ways to suffer as well. He wondered if Sam and Dean had ever gone looking for a monster and found an addict instead.

“It was Cas, right?” The group leader asked. “Would you like to share with us?”

Castiel frowned. “I’m... uh...”

“You can’t say anything wrong,” he assured him. “Not here.”

Cas nodded. “I suppose I’m here because... I lost something very important to me. And someone.”

“A friend?”

“A brother,” Castiel said. “Sam.”

“I’m so sorry,” the leader said. There were sympathetic noises from around the circle.

“I had a quiet life for a long time,” Castiel said. “Lately it feels like I screw up everything I touch. I thought I had a second chance, and...”

He couldn’t find the words. After a long pause, an older man stinking of urine began telling his own meandering story, and Castiel sat quietly, letting the words wash over him.

After the meeting, Joss invited him to a diner, for quote _real coffee._

“I used to be a soldier,” Cas told him when more details seemed necessary. “I thought I was helping people, but I wasn’t.”

Joss nodded.

“I thought civilian life would be better. But so far, it...” he flailed, staring into his drink. “To quote a friend, it sucks.”

Joss smirked. Then his eyes softened, and he said, “You’re not the only soldier to have reentry problems.” Cas raised his eyebrows. “No, not me,” Joss said. “I don’t even usually go to those meetings.”

“Why not?”

Joss cupped his mug, and Cas could feel phantom warmth in his hands. “It wasn’t me,” he eventually said. “It was my wife. She was an alcoholic, for as long as I knew her. At first I thought it was just youth, y’know - that’s how everyone is in their twenties. But it didn’t stop when we moved out here, away from the clubs and the parties. I got her to start going to meetings. She was clean for two years.”

He took a sip of his coffee. “Then she went to a liquor store one day and wrapped her car around a telephone pole on the way home.”

“I’m so sorry,” Castiel said. “What - did you ever find out why she -”

“There’s no why,” Joss said. “Sometimes people just go.”

*

Joss kept coming around, getting his morning coffee on just the tail end of rush hour, so there was enough time to chat a bit as he added his cream and sugar. Castiel stayed sober, but mostly because he didn’t know how to acquire more of the jittery man’s pills. Also because every day at the tail end of rush hour Joss came in and had his coffee and added cream and sugar and stirred the cup slowly, and they’d talk about what new customers had come in and how Joss’s furniture business was going and what was on the small staticky TV in the corner, and Cas knew Joss noticed that the bruises under his eyes weren’t so bad, exhaustion but not hangover, and that it made him happy.

Cas kept going to the meetings too, but Joss stopped after the second or third. The meetings were boring, though, and over coffee Castiel could practice telling jokes and bask in the warmth of Joss’ smile as he explained how Cas had botched the timing or the punchline.

After a while Cas started wondering how humans proceeded on this sort of thing, and eventually just waited for a lull in one of their conversations and said, “Would you like to go out some time?”

“No,” Joss said.

Cas complained about it at the meeting that night, wondering if the others could tell him where he’d gone wrong with finicky human etiquette. A dark-skinned girl made darker by her tattoos told him, “Some people never trust an addict.”

Castiel scowled. “And that’s okay,” she said. “I don’t trust myself. That’s why I come here.”

The next time he saw Joss, he said, “It’s because I remind you of your wife, isn’t it?”

Joss said, “Yes,” paid for his coffee, and left. 

Cas contemplated drinking that night, but decided he’d be just as miserable drunk; there was no escape. He sat on the gravel outside and stared at the stars. They twinkled, an illusion of movement - not that the stars themselves weren’t moving, but it was the evening sky, the skin of air around the earth, whose quiet turbulence made the light around the stars shake. Cas thought that if this was what being human was like, he had underestimated the Winchesters’ bravery all these years.

When Joss came in the next morning, he asked Cas, “How about dinner?”

*

The bunker was nice and all, but it was _boring._

Or at least, the library was. Dean would much rather be in his room with a vintage ‘Beauties or his kick-ass vinyl than pretending to read some soporific tome, just because -

“Get this,” Sammy said from the - honestly, from the _microfiche_ , because of _course_ the Men of Letters bunker had microfiche. Dean stood, cracked his back, and wandered over.

“Tom Rennels and Alice Sand,” Sam said, eyes still dorkily glued to the screen. “Engaged in 1941, the locals said it was the greatest love story the little town had ever seen.” He pulled back from the machine, smiling in satisfaction. “But he died a few years later on D-Day, they never got to tie the knot.”

“If he died in France -” Dean started.

“We only need one, and she’s buried in -”

Consciousness rushed back to Dean in a wave of nausea and a stinging pain in his cheek where it pressed against the shitty motel desk.

He sat up, blinking, the glow from the laptop making the rest of the room pitch black. He felt dizzy and weak, and there was still that awful perfume stench in the air from that chick from last night.

The dream was receding from him, like a wave leaving the shore, and he felt colder and colder as it went.

*

The first dozen sensations Cas had experienced after becoming human had been horrifying - cold, hunger, lethargy, pain. The longer he stayed human, the more he could add to the other column - the first bite of a great hamburger, water on a hot day, the feel of cool sheets on his back and hot skin along his side.

“Shh, this one is great,” Joss was saying. Castiel watched as a woman tripped and fell, spilling her drink dramatically.

“I don’t understand,” Cas said.

“Of course,” Joss sighed. He shifted a bit, the movement pulling a hiss out of Castiel as his shoulder throbbed in pain.

Joss’s eyes were sharp in the dim light from the TV. “Still hurting?”

There had been a man at the bus stop outside Castiel’s last meeting, a man who’d looked at him with wide eyes and said “Castiel?” It had been sheer dumb luck that Cas had been able to stab him with his own angel blade - accomplished fighter or no, he was no match for an angel with even partial strength. Before Cas had ganked him, he’d gotten in some hits of his own, and nearly twisted Cas’s arm out of its socket. 

Cas hadn’t felt relieved when it was done. He had wondered how many more were nearby, who would come looking for this brother.

It was a very good thing it had happened at the bus stop and not the gas station, because he didn’t know how he would have cleaned that up. The Win - Dean would have known, and even at the bus stop, late at night, he had gotten out his cell phone and started going through the contacts before he had remembered, and put his phone away, suddenly cold.

“Still not going to tell me, huh?” Joss was saying.

“I told you,” Castiel said, turning his lips into Joss’s skin so the words were muffled. “It was some crazy person outside my meeting.”

“Mmhm,” Joss said. “And you’ve never seen an infomercial before.”

“I understand now,” Castiel said. “They’re emphasizing the woman’s incompetence to make us believe the product is necessary.”

He turned to Joss, waiting for a smile, but his eyes were closed and his face was turned away.

“Joss?” He asked. He shook him lightly. After a moment he opened his eyes and turned his face back, his expression closed off.

“I don’t need all your secrets,” Joss said. “I’d settle for just one.”

It took Cas a long moment to understand. He tilted his head. “You’re scared. You’re worried you shouldn’t have taken a chance on me.”

Joss closed his eyes again and feigned sleep. Cas brought his head down on Joss’s chest. “One secret, one secret,” he murmured. “Oh! I used to wear the same clothes every day.” Joss said nothing, but the pattern of his breathing told Cas he was listening. “A suit. And a tan trenchcoat.”

“Sounds hot,” Joss mumbled.

“It was, but I didn’t notice it at the time,” Cas said. “And before I met you, I never would have been able to deduce another person’s feelings from their actions.”

“That, I already knew,” Joss said, tightening his arms. Cas liked how the dusting of hair on his chest felt against his face, how his ribs expanded slowly and deeply once he was asleep.

He had kept an eye on the papers that came in every morning in the days after the angel attack - scanning for strange deaths, unusual accidents or sightings. But finding one was never satisfying, it just burned a hole in his stomach until he took a deep breath and remembered Joss, remembered take-out in bed and learning about football and teasing arguments over the distribution of the blanket. Remembered that this was what he was good at - that he could make Joss happy.

The steady rhythm of Joss’s breathing had almost put him asleep too when he heard it. “There’s nothing to fear!” a cloying voice said. “If the angels come a-knocking, just let ‘em on in!”

He sat up in bed, gently disentangling himself from Joss’s arms. The man on the TV was fat, red, and standing in front of a piece of cardboard decorated to look like heaven. “Fill yourselves up with their grace!” He crooned.

Castiel found the remote at the foot of the bed and turned the TV off.

*

Dean didn’t drink tea, especially not when it was served on a fricking doily.

He grimaced, doing his best to turn it into a smile, and leaned forward to pick up the tiny cup, the Parishes smiling at him encouragingly. He fidgeted a bit as he took a sip - he was in his douchiest of undercover outfits: the faux academic, aka the shitty _blazer_. Probably looked like he owned a doily or two.

“Thanks,” he said, gesturing with the cup. “It’s great.”

“We’re just so flattered that anyone would actually want to write about our family,” Sarah said, beaming.

“Well, it’s a great story,” Dean said, getting his pencil ready. Under his shirt, the locket holding Olive’s hair was hot from his skin.

“A sad one,” Sarah said, with a little frown.

“Of course,” Dean said. “So Alice was your -”

“Great aunt,” Sarah said. “My grandmother’s sister. Just passed away a few years ago.” Bill gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. Dean quashed the eye roll.

“So you heard the story from her?” Dean asked. 

“More from my grandma,” Sarah said. “I guess Alice didn’t like to talk about it.”

“And they met when -”

“When Tom saved her,” Sarah nodded, “outside the soda fountain. Some rough guys were giving her a hard time, and Tom saw, came out and broke it up.” Dean nodded, trying not to picture _Grease_. “But his folks forbade him to see her because she was from the wrong side of town - ridiculous, isn’t it?” 

Bill nodded in sympathy. “So how did they - ?” Dean asked, gesturing with his pencil.

“Oh, well, it was the town!” Sarah said. “Who wants to see two lovebirds torn apart, right? All the local shop owners and neighbors would help them steal away for five minutes here or there. That’s how they became such a beloved couple. His parents finally relented a few years later and they got engaged.”

Dean scribbled something on his notepad. “But before they could, ah, consummate -”

Sarah nodded sadly. “World War II. He didn’t make it back.”

“Why didn’t they get married before he left?” Dean asked. “Wasn’t that the thing to do?”

Sarah shrugged. “I guess she was so sure he’d come back to her. She used to say it felt like...” 

“Like destiny?” Dean asked.

She nodded. “And she never remarried? Or, married anyone, I guess?”

“No,” Sarah said, and for some reason her stare shifted, like she was staring straight at Dean. He looked away uncomfortably.

“What did you say your paper was about?” Bill asked.

“Missed connections,” Dean said. “Historical, ah, tragedies, from a local perspective.”

“Sure,” Sarah said. 

“I’d love to pay my respects to Alice,” Dean said. “Do you know if she was laid to rest nearby?”

“Just up the street,” Sarah said. “Next to grandma.”

“Thanks,” Dean said, flipping his notebook closed.

“Oh, one more thing,” Sarah said, jumping up. “I dug this out when you called - thought you’d want to see it.”

In her palm was one of those vintage-y photobooth strips, yellowed and cracked with age. He recognized Tom and Alice from their pictures in the article he’d read, but these weren’t their buttoned-up class portraits - in the first picture they gazed at each other, young kids in love; in the second, they leaned in, eyes on each others’ lips; and in the third, Alice’s face was a frozen, laughing scream as Tom licked a big stripe up her cheek. Dean huffed out a surprised laugh.

“I know, right?” Sarah said. In the last picture, Alice was gone, but there was a blur of skirt in the edge of the frame, and Tom was laughing, reaching for her. Dean touched the photo, the film warm and grainy under his fingertips.

“Is that all you need?” Sarah asked, voice drawing him out of the image.

He looked up at her, Bill standing close with an arm around her shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “Thank you.”

*

Dean was raking leaves. Cas remembered this.

This was from that year, that horrible year. He hadn’t come often, had felt awkward and angry when he did, but sometimes he couldn’t stay away. Dean in soft plaid that wasn’t splattered with blood; Dean tending to a home; Dean getting eight hours of sleep.

There was no Crowley this time as Cas watched Dean rake leaves; and this time, Cas thought, maybe he should reach out. Put a hand on Dean’s shoulder. Tell him.

“Dean,” he said from across the lawn. Dean did nothing, kept raking the leaves methodically.

“Dean,” he tried again. Dean didn’t turn, didn’t see Castiel.

He strode forward, across the springy grass, and put a hand on Dean’s shoulder. Dean tensed, stood up straight, and turned around.

His eyes were black holes in his face, burning, bleeding, and his ears were running with blood, the tender drums inside burst. “Dean? Dean?” Cas asked, frantic, bringing his other hand to Dean’s shoulder. Dean’s skin started boiling.

Cas jerked awake in Joss’s bedroom, breath locked tight in his chest.

*

Digging out a grave was a lot harder with just one, and by the time he got back to his hotel Dean was crusted with dirt and sweat. Two ingredients down, one to go, he was self-satisfied and pissed off and tired, which was why he didn’t spot the attack until he was already stumbling to his knees.

Another blow, this time to his temple, brought him to his side, and it was followed by a kick to the gut. The past few months, he’d gotten good at taking out angels - one at a time, when he had the drop on them. Three or four in a room, with him fresh and stupid from a hunt? He coughed up blood and felt something in his chest groan in protest. A hand fisted in his shirt and hauled him up, off the ground, against the wall. 

His vision was blurry, so he couldn’t immediately tell who was speaking. “Metatron’s not an idiot, Dean,” the pale blob said. “He knew you’d be out for revenge.”

“You’re working for Metatron?” Dean coughed. “Guy who burned your wings off?”

“Once all threats have been eliminated Metatron will reward us.” Dean’s vision cleared slowly, showing a stiff brunette in typical uptight angel getup. “We will be among the only angels in heaven.”

Dean’s head was not doing great - the room was still spinning, though he knew the angel had him pinned up tight. “If you believe that, you’re an even bigger dumbass than the rest of your angel friends.”

The room actually shook as she slammed Dean against the wall for emphasis. “Where is Castiel?”

“He’s dead.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Couldn’t survive as a human,” Dean said, feeling his limbs start to go numb, his breath catching. “Kicked it.”

Brunette angel leaned in close. “Metatron wants all possible threats eliminated, including Castiel,” she hissed. “But it seems to me you’re the one spearheading this attack, so if we just kill you...” her hand tightened, taking his breathing from labored to nonexistent. _Sorry, Sammy._

There was a crack, but it wasn’t his neck. Dean slid slowly, anticlimactically to the floor as the rest of the room erupted into chaos, silver whirling and huge bursts of blue-white light searing the backs of Dean’s eyes.

He crawled forward, edging around the warring angels, and pulled himself up on the front door handle. He turned back just far enough to see another suited angel holding an angel blade to the brunette’s throat, saying, “Tell Metatron -”

Baby. The Impala was somewhere close, he knew he had parked - her smooth black paint was under his thumb a second later, smeared over with red. He crawled in through the passenger side, shimmying until his feet found pedals.

Lights were still blurry but he could vaguely see lines on pavement, so he drove for a few minutes in random directions. When he saw a mostly-empty parking lot he pulled around to the back, next to an old, mint-green Caddy. He slumped against the wheel for a second, trying to catch his breath.

_Dean, you okay?_ But Sammy wasn’t here. No one was watching his back anymore. 

_I’m sorry, Dean._ That’s right, that’s what Sammy had said. Last thing Sammy had said. Almost.

Dean had said _dead_ and Sammy had said, “So?”

_So._ His baby brother’s thoughts on going kamikaze. _So._

“Dean, it’s me or everyone else on the planet,” he’d said. “People like Mom, and Jess, and Sarah.”

“That wasn’t your fault, Sam!”

Sammy’s veins were lit up with light. “No, but if I stop now it will be.”

“Sammy, you’re not thinking straight!” Dean’s throat ached at the memory. “The trials, they’re messing with your head -”

“No, Dean,” Sam had said. “I’ve never felt clearer. This is what I’m supposed to do.”

Dean’s limbs were getting heavier by the moment. There were sirens in the distance. “What, because of all that crap you said about not being clean? I know I put a lot of shit on you, okay? Look, I’m sorry, Sammy. Please, please don’t do this!”

“I’m sorry, Dean. I hav

Dean jerked up, his one functioning brain cell forcing him out of the Impala and through the Caddy’s window and into the seat where he could pick apart the wires and get her running. Dad’s training - get away, muddy your trail, move unpredictably. He took the Caddy out of town, under the stars, to an empty field, the edge of a wood.

With his last ounce of consciousness he shoved himself into the back seat, the bone with a cupid’s mark etched into it stabbing him slightly from where it was wedged in his jacket. He looked up at the fabric ceiling and couldn’t remember if he’d locked the Impala. Didn’t even remember if he’d taken the keys. 

He’d been abandoning everything lately. Soon there’d be nothing left of Dean.

*

The room was smoky, hot, and filled with a horrible wailing Cas couldn’t stop.

It seemed to be coming from a small beige disk on the wall, whose red light was blinking furiously. Cas poked it at, wincing as the screeching increased in volume.

“Cas?” He heard behind him.

He turned, taking only a second to admire sleep-rumbled Joss in PJs. “I, uh,” he said sheepishly. “I was hungry.”

Joss’s eyes travelled from the heavily smoking pan to the smoke alarm and he sighed. “You have to wave the smoke away, c’mere.” He demonstrated how to use a dish towel to appease the machine.

“What was it?” He asked of the charred disc in the pan once the kitchen had finally fallen silent.

“An omelette.”

Joss sighed. “Put it in the sink, grab another.”

Cas watched as Joss demonstrated how to heat the pan _slightly_ and whisk the eggs and test if the butter was hot enough with a drop of water, passing him salt and ham and chives and utensils from around the kitchen, and getting the plates and drinks ready when it was almost done.

“This is overdue,” Joss said, rubbing his stomach after they’d eaten.

“What?” Cas asked, smothering a burp.

“You. Learning to cook,” Joss said. “You can’t keep subsisting on that crap you get at the store. You’ll get fat.”

“Really?” Cas asked, his eyes going wide. He had a vision of himself growing wide and pudgy; going gray; getting wrinkles. He didn’t think he’d mind as long as he wasn’t the only one.

Joss put a hand over his on the table. Cas smiled, enjoying the warmth. He liked Joss. 

A knock at the door startled them out of the moment. “I’ll get the plates,” Castiel said.

“No, no,” Joss said. “There’s this key to de-greasing. That’ll be your next lesson.”

“Okay,” Cas laughed, still smiling as he opened the door.

It was Dean.


	3. Chapter 3

Dean looked horrible.

There was an ugly purple bruise near his left temple, his lip was split, and Cas could tell by the way he was holding himself that there were dozens of injuries hidden under his clothes. There were huge bags under his handsome eyes, and one was circled by a fading ring of yellow. 

And then there were his eyes themselves - cold, wary, bitter.

Castiel realized they’d been gaping at each other for about a minute. “Uh,” he said. “Dean.”

“Heya, Cas,” Dean said, with a ghost of a smile.

“How did you find me?” Was the first thing that came to Castiel’s mind and immediately out of his mouth without his permission. Dean blinked, a small frown twitching his eyebrows together.

“Who’s this?” Cas heard from behind him, and they both turned to see Joss looking surprised and awkward.

“Uh,” Cas said again. “My friend. Dean.”

“Ookay,” Joss said. “I’ll just be, uh. Around back.” He walked to the back door with a small smile at Castiel.

“Wow,” Dean said when he was gone, eyes tracking Cas up and down. “Look at you. Human Cas.”

“Dean,” Cas floundered, “What -”

“I called Kevin,” Dean said. “He told me where he’d dropped you. I asked around a bit, the fed routine, y’know, and one of your pals at the gas station said you’d been staying here a lot.” He had a hand on the back of his neck now. “Checked it out. Thought I must’ve had the wrong place, no way a cashier was paying for all this. And then I, uh...” his voice became more uncertain. “... saw through the blinds, so...”

Cas swallowed. It was his first days as human all over again, too much going on, a million pieces of information screaming for his attention. _What did Dean want? Was Dean okay? Dean had spied on him and Joss?_

“How are you, Dean?” he asked.

“Been better,” he said curtly.

“Did angels do that?” Castiel asked, glancing at the bruises.

“Winner winner...” Dean laughed, voice thready. “Apparently Metatron’s got himself a few flunkies.”

The questions overwhelmed him again, none he could say. Dean shifted as the silence stretched out, then said, “Listen, Cas, I didn’t come here to bust up your -” he floundered for a moment, then restarted. “I need your help. Kevin knows how to undo Metatron’s spell.”

Castiel frowned. “Give the angels back their powers?”

“Yup.”

“You’re sure you want that?”

Dean raised an eyebrow, for a moment his old, cocky self. “You don’t?”

“I - look at what they’re doing now,” Castiel said. “I’ve seen the news, fighting between factions. Human and angel casualties mounting.”

“Only way to get at Metatron,” Dean said. “He’s invulnerable now, alone in heaven. I need a way in.”

“A way in?” Cas asked, shaking his head. “Even with the angels re-powered, you’d need someone to take you -”

“That’s the thing, Cas,” Dean said. “The whole point of the counterspell is it reverses what was done in the original. Can’t quite bring a nephilim back to life, but it’ll...” he paused. “It’ll restore your grace.”

“No,” Cas said, before he was even conscious of having spoken.

“No?” Dean asked, shocked and swiftly angry. “Christ, Cas, you were a wreck when I saw you last. What, now that you’re getting laid -”

Castiel was wrong: the conversation had not been truly awkward until this moment. Dean’s sentence slammed into a wall between them, and the silence crackled. Dean’s face flushed red. He looked away first.

“I have found some measure of... comfort in a human life,” Castiel said.

Dean’s mouth twisted, small and ugly. “That’s great, Cas. Glad you found someone who could do that for you.”

“I’m not -” Castiel sighed. “I don’t want to cause any more pain, Dean.” The smirk melted off Dean’s face. “I did horrible things as an angel. I _caused_ the chaos that gave Metatron his opportunity in the first place, as an angel.”

Dean leaned forward, eyes blazing. “Yeah, and you pulled me outta hell as an angel.” That awkward pause seemed to hit Castiel harder. “This will take the angels off earth, no more collateral. Put them back in heaven and put Metatron on the run.” He paused, breathing harshly. “Metatron, Cas. He’s the one who didn’t tell Sammy what the trials would do.” Dean’s voice had dropped, shaking. “He’s why Sammy’s dead.”

Cas’s throat tightened. “I think of Sam often.”

“I need this, Cas,” Dean said, voice low and ruined. “I need to make it right.”

Cas tilted his head and frowned. “You didn’t fail Sam,” he said. Dean almost smiled, shaking his head. “Sam was a hero.”

“A martyr.”

“He shut the gates of hell,” Castiel said. “He saved millions of people.”

“Wasn’t worth it,” Dean muttered, staring at the ground.

“Dean...” Castiel said. “Just because Sam chose something that took him away from you, doesn’t mean he didn’t love you.”

There was a choked, horrible moment. Cas’s eyes watered as he held Dean’s flinty stare. Something inside hurt, like pressing on a bruise. 

“Are you gonna help or what,” Dean asked.

Cas dropped his eyes to Joss’s warm wooden floor. “I’m sorry.”

*

Cas was still pacing agitatedly when Joss came back in from the garden. “Hey, what’s the matter?” He grabbed Cas gently by the shoulders. “Your friend leave?”

“Yes, he’s gone,” Castiel said. 

“Do I want to know what he said to upset you like this?”

“He -” Cas paused. “He wants me to help him with something.”

“Something bad?” Joss asked. “He want you to use?”

“No, no,” Cas said. “He...” He looked up into Joss’s green eyes, so soft and warm, so completely unlike Dean’s. “He wants me to... go back to what I was before. To leave here,” he clarified.

Joss’s hands tightened and something indefinable flashed behind his eyes. “Do you want to?”

“I -”

Glass shattered as a young woman in a track suit crashed through Joss’s living room window. She stalked towards them as two others followed, raising their angel blades. Joss reached for the woman’s shoulder. Cas yelled, “No!”

She turned and yanked on his wrist in one smooth motion, sending him flying across the room. But that distracted her long enough for Cas to grab her wrist, turning her blade into her own chest. He didn’t pause as she flamed out, ducking underneath her vessel’s corpse to face the other two, a tall man with close-cropped hair and a blunt, chiseled face and a short blonde woman. They circled him warily.

She struck first, bringing her blade up high, and while he blocked the man came up behind him, but he ducked in time for his swing to go wide. He turned his duck into a roll, heading for the kitchen where he yanked open a drawer and cut himself on a steak knife while scrabbling for the angel blade he had stashed in the back.

When he looked up, Joss was gone from the corner he had landed in - dragged to the center of the room by the short blonde angel, who was holding her angel blade to his throat.

“We don’t have to hurt him, Castiel,” she said, eyes flicking to Castiel’s blade as he tossed it from hand to hand. “Come quietly.”

“Or,” Cas said, and slammed his bleeding palm onto the angel banishing sigil he’d painted on the bottom of the cutlery drawer weeks ago.

The angels screamed, and the flare of white light felt like it went straight to Cas’s heart, thumping painfully. His grim smile faded when he saw Joss crumpled on the floor where the angel holding him had been. Castiel rushed to his side.

“What the hell was that?” Joss wheezed. His eyes were unfocused. A cell phone slid out of his hand, 911 on the screen, a tinny voice asking _sir? sir!_

Castiel’s fingers ran over his skull worriedly. “I think you might have a concussion.”

“That why I saw some crazy beams of light?”

“Yes,” Castiel said, finding the bleeding and pressing his palm to it, gently.

“On second thought,” Joss breathed, “I don’t think I want to know your secrets after all.”

Castiel looked at him - really looked at him. His eyes were wandering, but they were sharp.

Castiel swallowed. “I told you. I was a soldier.”

“You had some good moves,” Joss said.

“Not good enough,” Cas said. “The human skull is so fragile. You could have been killed.”

“I would have been, if you weren’t here,” Joss said. His eyes were fixed on Castiel’s now.

Cas shook his head. “That’s not true. I brought this to your door.”

“That is true,” Joss said. “I just can’t figure out why.”

Cas frowned. “Why what?”

“Why are you here?” He whispered. Castiel’s heart sunk, but Joss’s face was warm and curious, not angry. “There’s clearly... somewhere else you’re supposed to be.”

Cas looked away, his ears roaring. “You saw. I - my life was violent. I made... catastrophic mistakes. I caused so much pain.”

“And you were running away?” Joss asked.

“I was choosing a new life. A peaceful life,” Castiel said. In the distance, sirens wailed.

“Can’t begrudge you that,” Joss said, coughing. “I was peaceful for a long time. But then...” He raised a gentle hand to Castiel’s face. Cas closed his eyes, relishing the warm, calloused touch. “Turned out I was just scared.”

Castiel blinked back tears. “You want me to leave?”

Joss smiled. “I want you to not give up.”

The sirens were deafening now. “Only way to make up for doing bad is to do good,” Joss said. “And it seems like you can do better than pumping gas and telling me terrible jokes.”

As a human, Castiel’s memory was no longer perfect, and the farther back his memories, the foggier they had become. But one from several years ago came back to him as he heard cars pull up outside the house: a young man in a barn he’d told, “Good things do happen.”

Paramedics were coming into the house. They were going to take Joss away from him at any moment. “I’m sorry,” Castiel whispered.

“It was never going to work,” Joss smiled. “You’re a terrible cook.”

Cas kissed him on the forehead, and leaned their heads together.

*

He found Dean, naturally, at the motel Kevin had dropped him at all those months ago.

“I’ll help you,” he said when Dean opened the door.

“Hello to you too,” Dean drawled, stepping aside. Ever sharp, his eyes snagged on Cas’s bandaged hand right away. “What happened there?”

“Visit,” Cas said. “From some of Metatron’s ‘flunkies’.” He understood now that air quotes were overdone, but still barely restrained using them.

“Jesus,” Dean breathed. “Crap, Cas, they must have followed me here.”

“It’s done. Joss -” Dean winced “and I are fine, and...” Castiel paused. “It made me realize I can’t sit on the sidelines while there’s a war going on.”

Dean nodded tightly. “Good. I need your help.”

There was another awkward pause that Castiel decided to power through. “So. You said something about reversing what was done...?”

“Right,” Dean said. “I need three ingredients, just like Metatron had. Since the last ingredient was,” he gestured awkwardly, “your grace, my last ingredient has to be -”

“My blood?” Cas asked, already unwrapping his bandage.

“No.” Dean stilled him with a hand on his, which was quickly pulled back. Dean smiled sheepishly. “Your sweat, actually.”

Cas raised his eyebrows. “My sweat?”

“Opposite of an angel’s grace,” Dean said. “As human as it gets.”

Castiel blinked, then looked around the motel room. He walked into the bathroom, picked up a towel, walked back to Dean, wiped his brow, and held it out with a shrug.

*

The spell, as it turned out, was incredibly mundane - Dean sprinkled Cas’s sweat (ew) and the nephilim’s hair onto a cupid-marked bone of a person who never ended up with their intended, and drove the sharpened, anointed bone into the earth.

They were in the middle of a secluded field that Cas had alluded to being very close to where he had first fallen as a human. They weren’t sure whether the location mattered, but had decided not to risk it.

As a rule, Dean did not like it when he followed magic instructions to a T and nothing happened. But just as he was about to voice his foreboding to Cas, Cas said, “Listen.”

Dean perked his ears, still hearing nothing. A second later, the ground began to shake, and something like a wailing floated in on the wind. He looked down at the bone, the grass whirling around it, and thought that closer to the epicenter the grass looked greener, and that the pigmentation was spreading. Before his eyes, a wildflower sprung up and bloomed, then another and another, the field bursting with life all at once.

“Dean,” he heard behind him, and turned. Cas was staring at his hands, confused and horrified.

“Cas?” Dean took a step forward, but he had thrown out a hand.

“I can feel it,” he said. “Dean - close your eyes!”

Dean remembered Anna regaining her grace - the searing light, that unique eardrum-rattling angel noise. But he didn’t remember _heat_ searing his back as he huddled on the ground, or a rumbling vibration that seemed to shake his bones. His vision was spotty when he opened his eyes, still stinging from what had gotten through his eyelids.

He had kinda expected Cas to immediately zap back into his trenchcoat and suit, not remain in faded jeans and an oversized gray t-shirt. Aside from wondering if they were the other guy's or his, Dean hadn’t thought much of the clothes, but they screamed _wrong_ now - now that, even with the stubble and the hair and the holes in his jeans, Cas crackled with power.

Dean shifted uneasily, trying not to think of what was happening worldwide to the other angels, or of the way Cas’s eyes had gone closed-off and angel-hard once more as they met Dean’s.

“We must move quickly,” Cas said, striding towards him. “I’m aware you’re not a fan of air travel, but there’s no other way to heaven.”

“You aren’t going to, uh. Kill me,” Dean asked. “Are you?”

Cas’s deadpan was the same, human or angel. “You haven’t seemed afraid to die these last few months.”

Dean quirked a smile. “Never said I was smart.”

“Dean,” Cas said. “You look like shit. You’ve been going after angels alone -”

“I _am_ alone, in case you haven’t noticed,” Dean snapped. “ _Thanks to Metatron._ ”

“Not anymore,” Cas said, and it did something funny to Dean’s breathing. “I’m here to take down Metatron for what he did to me, the angels, and yes, to Sam.” He stepped forward, his frown intensifying. “I’m not here for your vengeance. Or your self-destruction.”

Dean clenched his jaw. “Fine.”

The forehead-zap dropped them in a garbage-strewn alley in what looked like a city, though Dean couldn’t tell which. He frowned. “Uh, Cas, I think you missed.”

“No,” Cas said. “This is heaven.” At Dean’s raised eyebrows, he said, “You’ve been before. It’s crafted of human memories. Do you have any memories of a room made of clouds?”

Dean rolled his eyes, then nodded when he noticed people running down the street at the end of the alley. “What’s that?”

“Other angels,” Cas said. “Returning. Gunning for Metatron. We must go first.”

“How can we find him?”

Cas frowned, his gaze turning inward. “My grace. Metatron has had it in his possession for the last several months. I think I may be able to use it to track him.”

“Your grace has Metatron musk on it?” Dean said. “Gross.”

That earned him the classic Cas pissed-off stare, which was so familiar and welcome that for a second Dean forgot the hunt altogether. Then he said, “Wait. We’re in heaven?”

“Yes?”

He swallowed, his heart suddenly thundering. “Is... Sam?”

Cas’s face softened. “Yes Dean. He closed the gates of Hell. He’s here.”

He was able to breathe again, but just barely. “Can -” He choked before he could finish the sentence. His heart was hammering fit to bust out of his chest.

“If -” Cas paused. “We won’t catch Metatron. He’ll already be on the run.”

Dean’s eyes burned. He pushed everything down, away. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s hunt.”

Cas rested a hand on Dean’s shoulder, and they started what Dean assumed was some kind of weird, metaphysical chase - they sometimes bamfed in and out of a location so fast he couldn’t see, but he caught snatches of an airplane hanger, a wide, endless-ocean, a hello kitty store, a forest, a desert, a poorly-renovated basement with shag carpet, an art museum, a parking lot, and arctic tundra, before landing in - of course - a library.

Metatron was right there, a dozen feet away, stuffing books off the shelves into an honest-to-god canvass bag (although who the hell knew what it really was - stupid heaven perception hijinks).

He stiffened when he saw them, a flash of what could have been panic crossing his grubby face before it was eclipsed by a beatific smile. “Castiel,” he said. “I’m disappointed - you were well on your way to that wife and kids.” He smirked. “Well, domestic partner and adopted third-world toddlers. It’s a shame you’ve -”

Cas bamfed behind him and grabbed him by the shoulders, startling him into silence. Dean was grateful. 

“You,” he said, advancing on Metatron, relishing the cold grip of the angel blade in his palm. “You cut out Cas’s grace. You sent a bunch of pissed-off angels to my planet. And you let my brother kill himself finishing _your_ trials.”

“I told you,” Metatron said. “Throw a major lever, pay a price.”

Dean let the tip of the blade dig into that awful sweatervest. “You could. Have been more. _Specific_.”

“Dean,” Cas said. “The other angels are closing in on us.” Dean met his eye, nodded, and tightened his fist on the hilt of the blade.

“Wait!” Metatron cried. “Dean, I’m sure Castiel here has told you about the concept of alternate universes, correct?”

Dean glared. “So?”

“I’ve been the only one up here monitoring the paths for a while now,” Metatron babbled. His eyes darted between Dean and the blade. He was sweating. “There’s one where Sam didn’t go ahead with the trials.”

The world tilted slightly, but Dean ignored it. “There’s one where I’m a soap opera star,” he snapped. “What’s your point?”

Metatron scoffed. “That was a tiny, deformed little twig. This is a major offshoot, a fully functional reality, almost equal to ours,” he said, starting to get into it, enthused and pleading. “Sam’s alive. You two are working together, using what you know of the trials to hunt. And Dean, you’re close to killing Abbadon - _a knight of hell_.”

Dean glanced at Cas, whose face was shuttered. “Let me live,” Metatron was saying, “and I’ll tell you how to bring it into prominence.”

“Bring it -”

“Make it the dominant reality,” he said. “Make it so that Sam never completed the trials.”

Dean’s heart hammered wildly. “And the gates of Hell are open.”

“ _And Sam is alive_.”

Dean thought of Sam’s face as he’d stood in that stupid run-down church, not tired and yearning anymore, but glowing with pride. He thought about what hell the last few months had been, how much hunting sucked without his research-moose of a brother. How much he missed teasing him for his awful music and stupid jogging and stinking up the Impala. His warm weight as a baby, cradled in Dean’s arms on the wet lawn outside their house.

“My brother was a hero,” Dean told Metatron. “And he’d kick my ass if I opened the gates of hell just to have him back.”

Metatron opened his mouth to plead. Dean put the angel blade through his heart.

*

The trenchcoat was still in the bunker, exactly where Castiel remembered leaving it - lying crumpled on Dean’s travel bag in his room. He shook it out, only a little wrinkled and dusty, and put it on again. It felt odd over his human clothes.

Across the room, Dean was running his fingertips over the furniture and picture frames. Cas wasn’t sure where he had put the bloody angel blade. “I missed this place,” Dean said absently. He wandered over to the bed, falling back onto it with only the slightest bounce. “Mm. Memory foam.” 

Castiel smiled. “Hey, Cas?” Dean asked.

“Yes?”

Dean’s eyes were open, but he was staring up at the ceiling. “You had to angel up again because of me, and, uh -”

“It’s okay, Dean,” Cas said. “I don’t regret it.”

“You don’t?” Dean was frowning at him now. “You seemed pretty, uh, into humanity when I found you.” He chuckled a bit at his double entendre.

Cas sat on the bed across from him. “I was,” he said. “Being human taught me a lot, and I’m glad I had the experience. I’ll miss certain things. Food.”

“You can’t eat anymore?”

“It won’t be the same. Sights, sounds, even touch...” He ran his hand along the bedspread. Dean followed the slow movement and swallowed. “It’s not as... it’s like I know how the sheet feels, instead of feeling it.”

“That sucks,” Dean mumbled.

Cas shrugged. “Gabriel and Balthazar found a way to enjoy earthly pleasures for thousands of years. I’m sure I just need practice.” Cas meant to smile, but he met Dean’s eye and his throat dried up.

“So you’re not upset?” Dean asked.

“No,” Cas said. “This is who I am. You were right - I was an angel when I pulled you from Hell. I was an angel when I helped stop the apocalypse. Being human gave me new perspective. But I don’t need to be human to feel. To care.”

Dean nodded and closed his eyes. There was something hanging in the air, something that made Cas feel as if he had permission to come onto the bed fully, stretching out next to Dean. He propped himself up on his elbow.

“Dean...” he said. “I owe you an apology.”

“For what?”

“I understand now why... what happened between us months ago -”

Dean’s eyes flew open. “Cas -”

“Was wrong.”

Dean blinked. “Wrong?”

“You were drunk,” Cas said. “I took advantage.”

“Cas -” Dean laughed without smiling.

“But it’s not just that,” Cas said. “I was - overwhelmed. Feeling things for the first time. Heat, touch -”

“Lust?” Dean asked, raising his eyebrows.

Castiel flushed slightly. “Yes.”

Dean’s grin was hard. “So I was just the first thing your pent-up human self found?”

“No! I - You were upset, and I wanted -” Castiel floundered, before finishing lamely: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Dean snorted. “I get that.”

“But it showed more concern for my... needs, than your feelings,” Cas continued. “It introduced a complication you didn’t need at that moment. No wonder you -” 

“It wasn’t a complication, Cas,” Dean interrupted. “Well, it wasn’t _just_ a complication. I was...” Dean shook his head, his shoulders tight with tension. “I couldn’t let it go. I just - I couldn’t. And I - I still can’t believe I gave up - that I just -”

“Dean -”

Dean held up a hand, the other pressing into his eyes. “No, it’s okay. It’s done,” he said hoarsely. He breathed in deep, and sighed. “It’s done.”

Castiel waited, and when the silence had grown too awkward, said, “I’ll, uh, find a room -”

“No,” Dean said immediately. “Wait, you don’t have to leave yet.”

“But -”

“Let’s practice that human sensations thing,” he said. Castiel’s heart stopped. Dean flushed but hopped off the bed wordlessly, rummaging around a crate full of vinyl records, and Castiel released a long breath. Dean put the record on the player and laid back on his side of the bed as the opening notes played, something vibrant and smooth. 

Castiel took another breath and tried to _hear_.

And as the notes passed he thought it started to work, the music flowing through him instead of just around. He found himself sinking into the bed, not tired, just peaceful, and realized after a time that he and Dean had started to gravitate toward each other. Not purposefully, or at least not consciously, but every time he made the effort to check they were pressed together more closely. By the time the record was popping and crackling soothingly, Cas’s head was resting on Dean’s arm, his face pressed partially into Dean’s shoulder.

“Dean?” he asked.

“Yeah, Cas?”

“I’m better at sex now.”

Dean laughed into Cas’s hairline, and rolled his eyes.


End file.
